The use of honeycomb structures in commercial and military applications is well known. Various industrial applications require structural materials which are capable of extended use and have a high specific strength, that is high strength to weight ratios. One class of such material is honeycomb. These structures can be compositionally and geometrically tailored to exhibit controlled mechanical, electrical, and chemical properties useful in the commercial sector and military sector, such as a material to be sandwiched between two sheets of material.
Previous attempts to fabricate variable shaped honeycomb structures from sheets of radar absorbent material suffer from labor intensive and time consuming operations. Currently radar absorbent material sheets are cut in a length dimension and manually placed on a lay-up table. Each consecutive sheet is placed manually half a pitch width apart such that sheets alternate the nodeline position through the stack which is the width direction of the honeycomb before expansion. This is an extremely tedious task and prone to eye fatigue and operator error. Errors in alignment of the sheets not only cause poor cell configuration but also has a significant impact on block electrical as well as mechanical properties. Automation of this tedious layup process can significantly impact the cost and quality of honeycomb structures and eliminate a bottleneck from the manufacturing process.
It is, therefore, evident that there exists a need in the art for a low cost method of producing a variable shaped honeycomb structure formed from sheets of radar absorbent material.